


A Case for Time Unwasted

by searchforthescars



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, University AU, in which Amanda cannot write academic papers and it shows, two non-explicit mentions of sex acts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:20:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27884389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/searchforthescars/pseuds/searchforthescars
Summary: “Honestly, at this point, if someone wants to date me or fuck me, they’re going to be required to present me with a four-page paper, double-spaced, MLA citations, on how they’re not going to break my heart or waste my time, respectively."Camilla makes a statement. Palamedes follows through on the request. The resulting misunderstandings really should be expected.
Relationships: Camilla Hect/Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 15
Kudos: 73





	A Case for Time Unwasted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [necromanticatheart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/necromanticatheart/gifts).



> Happy birthday, Lindsay. Thank you for your kindness, compassion, and friendship. The world is better because you're in it, and I'm a better person for knowing you.

“Honestly?” Palamedes hears Camilla say from somewhere across the dining hall. (Yes, he can hear her voice in a crowded space, and what of it? They’ve known one another since they were two.) “Honestly, at this point, if someone wants to date me or fuck me, they’re going to be required to present me with a four-page paper, double-spaced, MLA citations, on how they’re not going to break my heart or waste my time, respectively."

“Isn’t a one-night stand designed to waste time?” Harrowhark asks, just as Palamedes comes to stand behind her.

Cam’s eyes flick up to meet Palamedes’s, the dark brown glinting like granite in the diffused light from the far-off ceiling windows. “There’s a difference between passing time and wasting it. If it’s the former, at least I’d get to come.”

Harrow makes an undignified sound, irritation exacerbated by Palamedes’s hand on her shoulder. Palamedes slides into the seat beside her, playing absently with the ring on his pointer finger while saying, “My apologies, Ninth, didn’t-”

“Oh my  _ god _ , you act like that competition was everything,” Harrow sighs, “when you came in  _ sixth place at the hackathon _ -”

“Three places higher than you did,” Camilla says drily, picking through her salad, face completely blank save for the wrinkles around her eyes Palamedes knows means she’s fighting back a smile.

“And that’s after you bragged about your subject-matter expertise,” Palamedes leans forward to snag a carrot sliver from Cam’s bowl of greens. “So no, I won’t soon allow you to forget your hubris.”

Harrow huffs, but says nothing, and so Palamedes knows he’s won, and so he turns his attention to Camilla. “I’ve heard of requiring references from fuckbuddies, but your paper concept is a new one.”

She cocks an eyebrow. “How better to know that I shouldn’t waste my time?”

He sighs in acquiescence of her point, his tongue still working at that carrot sliver. Already, his mind is crafting the thesis:  _ However could I bear to break your heart when mine is tied to everything you are? _

* * *

Camilla knows three things about this week.

One: It is midterms week and so the 800-square-foot apartment she shares with Palamedes has been beset by dirty dishes, books, laundry that is only slightly clean, and mounds of takeout containers.

(One-point-five: This time of year, she always sleeps in the one sweatshirt Palamedes owns, a fuzzy grey thing he’s had since early high school. He always lets her. She doesn’t examine why.)

Two: Palamedes has two papers due in the span of three days, so more often than not she comes home from long days at the library and at the gym to see him hunched over the desk they share, tapping away at his computer with squinted eyes and posture like the world’s saddest parenthesis. 

(Two-point-five: She always taps him on the small of the back and says, “Straighten up,” and he always does, sighing in relief when his back cracks.)

Three: She has been waiting for him to finish writing this paper for the better part of an hour, ever since they got back from lunch with Harrow and he speed-walked to their shared bedroom, closing the door behind him.

(Three-point-five: It is important to note that they share a bedroom because finding a cheap one-bedroom apartment was practical and besides, they basically lived on top of one another throughout all of high school, so this made sense.)

When Palamedes emerges, hair a mess, collar rumpled, and glasses askew, he blinks at her as if he didn’t expect to see her where he left her. Then, he sighs the sigh of a man who has just completed a Herculean undertaking only to find his efforts unacknowledged. “Camilla,” he says haltingly. “This is for you.”

She takes the paper without really looking at it. It’s thin, maybe five pages, and she already knows most of the errors will be in the punctuation. Palamedes never knows when to swap a semicolon for an em dash.

“Thanks.”

He hovers for a while in that awkward space between their living room and the sliver of floor space designated for their dining room table, before vanishing back to the bedroom. This time, she notes with vague interest, he leaves the door open.

* * *

The 45 minutes it takes Camilla to read the paper are the longest 45 minutes of Palamedes’s life. And that’s including the one time he was asked to sit for one of Dulcinea’s many ill-fated portraits, when she swatted him with a slipper every time he shifted or twitched.

He’s sitting on the edge of the bed when she comes in, bouncing his leg up and down, and when he looks up at her, her face betrays nothing but the vaguely distant look she always gets in her eyes when she’s done reading something. 

“There were a few grammatical errors, one sentence that changed tenses halfway through, and I amended one of your citations,” she says, handing him the paper, “but overall it was a good effort. Easily an A minus, even in your mother’s book. Though,” she says, mouth twitching at the corner, “given the explict nature of your reference material on cunnilignus, I wouldn’t hand this in to Dr. Zeta unless you have an explanation at hand.”

He’s dumbfounded, absolutely stricken, and it’s only when she pauses at the doorway that he realizes she has more to say. “Whoever she is,” Cam says, her voice a little raspy, “she’s lucky.”

Palamedes can’t find the words to amend his mistake before Camilla vanishes.

* * *

“He  _ what _ ?!”

“Can it, Nav.” Camilla brushes off her hands on her shirt, motioning for Gideon to sit down on the free weights bench. “I said, he wrote a paper on-”

“No, no, I heard you.” Gideon stares at Cam in the gym’s floor-to-ceiling mirror across the room. “But  _ why _ ?”

Camilla tries very hard to keep her expression neutral. It had crossed her mind, once, that maybe he had written it for her. But it was too sweet, too passionate, too...too much. Too much to be hers. She couldn’t-  _ wouldn’t  _ allow herself to assume. “I have no idea.”

* * *

“You  _ what _ ?!”

“Dulcinea!” Palamedes’s disgruntlement at his oldest friend’s laughter turns to worry when she starts coughing. He leans forward to whack her on the back, only to be pushed away by feeble, fluttering hands. “Be careful!”

“‘Be careful’ my ass. Chicken,” she clears her throat, “Palamedes, my sweet, sweet boy. Why on earth would you  _ do this _ ?”

“Because she said-”

“Did you specify it was for her?”

“No…”

Dulcinea leans back in her seat and nods her head decisively. Surrounded on her couch as she is with books and medical journals, she looks like the porcelain doll edition of a belabored doctoral student. The collector’s edition would come with a shoe to swat him with, he thinks idly, since that seems to be about all she can manage by way of chastisement.

“Pal. You and Camilla are horribly obtuse.”

Palamedes pushes his glasses up his nose. “Thanks.”

“I mean,” she huffs, “Camilla is never going to assume you love her. Not after everything that happened between us. So you have to tell her.”

“I did tell her! I gave her the paper!”

Dulcinea’s wide eyes pin him in his place like a moth’s wings held for display by a pin. “Tell her again.”

* * *

In the absence of Palamedes, Camilla re-reads the paper.

She can’t help it; it was sitting out on the kitchen counter and he didn’t take it with him when he left to turn in his biology final, so sue her if she read it while sipping the dregs of his morning coffee from the mug she got him for Christmas.

(If her cheeks color at the thought of her mouth being where his was earlier, that is neither here nor there. Because while they have never dated, there was that one night freshman year…)

Camilla shakes herself out of the memory. She flips to the second page, to the section where the tense change was needed ( _ because he was too involved in what he was writing to notice,  _ her traitorous brain supplies).

_ Although an argument can be made for a friends-with-benefits relationship, I reject that notion on the basis of my own emotions, and also on my intentions to build a lasting partnership upon the foundation of academic work and shared space that we have already laid. While I cannot guarantee the building of such a relationship will be without time wasted, I believe the time well-spent will make up for it. _

From her perch, Camilla surveys their apartment. The wall-to-wall bookcase cobbled together from two-and-a-half bookshelves she and Gideon hauled home from Walmart. The framed photo of her and Palamedes from their high school graduation. The tiny couch upon which the freshman year incident occurred.

She sees the dirty dishes in the sink, the half-empty coffee pot, and takes stock of the mug in her hand. All evidence of a life shared.

She could, Camilla decides, bury her face in her hands and cry.

Instead, she hops off the counter and gets to work.

* * *

“Camilla.”

Palamedes doesn’t know if she’s ready for bed; it’s late, but she’s not wearing his sweatshirt, and the couch is still populated with books and papers. When he calls her name, she doesn’t even look up; simply shifts her body towards him ever-so-slightly to signal that she is, in fact, paying attention. 

“Camilla,” he says again, and this time she does look up. He nearly flinches under the steadiness of her gaze. “I wanted to give you this.”

He extends the paper, her red ink all over it still. “This was written for you.”

Her mouth falls open, just a bit. He could sink his teeth into that lower lip and summarily die of gratitude. He could wake up beside her as a boyfriend (though he hates the title) and be grateful.

Camilla says nothing. She takes the paper, before pulling one of her own from the stack on the couch. It’s a single page, double-spaced.

**_A Report on_ A Case for Time Unwasted**

“What…”

“Keep reading.”

Her voice is so low. He would shiver if his hands weren’t already shaking.

**_A Report on_ ** **A Case for Time Unwasted**

**_Palamedes Sextus’s paper, addressed to an unidentified individual, discusses his romantic feelings and sexual attraction toward this individual and aims to prove the various ways in which he will not waste their time. He enumerates on his demonstrated practical skills in the bedroom and kitchen, and elaborates on the ways in which he would like to attempt building a sustainable shared life and partnership with the addressee of this paper._ **

**_If this paper is addressed to Camilla Hect, she would like Sextus to know that she has shared his feelings since she was a teenager and would like to move forward exploring the hypotheses presented. If this paper was not addressed as such, she would appreciate it if Sextus could disregard this response paper._ **

* * *

Camilla is not prepared for how quickly Palamedes’s attentions snap back to her after reading.

“Cam,” he breathes. “Are-”

“If you ask me if I’m sure, I’m going to- oh!”

He hugs her so tightly her back almost cracks, and she can’t help but laugh into his shoulder. “I thought-”

“Camilla, you thought I needed  _ editing help _ ?”

“I wasn’t- I didn’t think you wanted-”

“You’re an idiot, Hect.” He draws away just enough to press a kiss to her temple. “And I’m a fool.”

“So I assume my response was taken in good faith?” she presses, raising an eyebrow as he starts to smile.

Her heart leaps when he presses a palm to her cheek. “Yes, Ms. Hect.” He presses a kiss to her forehead. “The very best.”

**Author's Note:**

> Editor's Notes:  
> -All mistakes are my own, pls roast me for them in the comments  
> -There's a whole thing in my brain about the hackathon mentioned at the beginning, wherein Cam and Pal were going to team up but Palamedes decided to let Cam off the hook because "we might as well give someone else a chance to win." So benevolent...  
> -The idea to have this paper be edited by Camilla, and the misunderstandings that follow, came from the genius mind of [dilapidatedcorvid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilapidatedcorvid/pseuds/dilapidatedcorvid). Thank you for being my brain cell, as always.


End file.
